SanDisk Sansa Clip+ 8 GB

Firstly, let me just say that I'm not much of a fan of Apple products for one main reason - you pay a premium for something that you can get with other brands who do it better. I wanted a music player that was small and had enough storage space for my collection. Step up the Sansa Clip +. Apple's equivalent is probably the Shuffle for the same price and purpose.

However, what you get with the Sansa Clip is 8GB of storage and a microSD slot for the option to expand to even more. The Sansa Clip is small and feels sturdy enough, and as the name suggests, has a clip.

As a music player, it does everything I want it to - play music. For me, I find it perfect. Its easy to use, no frills and plays all file formats including the high quality FLAC format,. OK, the supplied earbuds are nothing to shout about but they rarely are. Coupled with a decent pair of earphones and the sound you can get is just perfect.

Putting music onto the clip is merely a case of drag and drop. Playing music is very intuitive. The only thing the Clip falls behind Apple's nano (no point comparing it to the shuffle) is scrolling through the artists. If you have a large collection then getting to a particular artist or song can be quite labourous. Other than that you can browse the music collection by song name, artist, album, genre, top rated.

There are even modes for Audiobook and Podcast which I find useful because i listen to podcasts. Podcasts resume from where you last paused, and audiobook is sorted by "chapters". However, you can't fastforward with audiobook mode.

Battery life for the clip, i've not measured myself as I use it on and off. But using it on and off I only need to charge it every 10 days or so which is not a problem for me. It charges via mini usb so you're never short of a cable if you're around computers and need to charge it. With the clip being basically a flash drive, you can use it as such, especially with 8GB, and despite my collection being rather big, I still have about 3GB free to use as external storage.

All in all, this is a great little product, whether for the gym or on the move. Its small, light, convenient, reproduces sound really well, no frills and no fuss usage.